The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘But that’s it. Your dad’s gone and so has Sheila.’

  ‘Where? To hell in a handcart?’

  ‘They’re in Ireland, lying low, so my dad thinks. The knives came out for them when you disappeared. Secrets came out. Their love affair was the talk of the streets and Sheila got a formal reprimand from her inspector. Which was nothing to what she got from our gran. Then the big rumours started.’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘First your mother disappeared, then you. Then your mother’s actor-fellow resurfaced.’

  ‘Who? That Timothy Cartland she ran off with?’ Coralie’s ears hurt from the pressure of her pulse, from forgetting to breath.

  ‘She didn’t, that’s the point. I read in a newspaper that a play had opened in Shaftesbury Avenue, and it mentioned a Timothy Cartland. I went to see him after a matinée. I thought you’d want me to.’

  No, she thought. Why can’t you leave well alone?

  ‘I asked him, “Where’s Florence Masson?” He didn’t know but when I said her stage name, Florence Fielding, he remembered working with her about twenty-five years ago. “A slip of a woman with a big, loud voice.” He swore they’d never had a fling. He had been to New York but he’d travelled alone and come back alone, in 1938, and in all that time, he said, he’d never heard a squeak of Florence Fielding. I went away, thinking, If Florence didn’t go to America—’

  ‘That’s enough, Donal. Leave it buried.’ Coralie reached up and kissed him, the better to shut him up, and was completely unprepared for the physical yearning that coursed through her. It was more potent than sexual desire. Donal had grown into a handsome man. He was in uniform, serving his country, and that was excuse enough, but until this moment she hadn’t realised how desperately she missed love. Missed the comfort of a shared existence. If anybody was safe to be with, it was Donal. They’d shared the same air, the same dust. Yet as he pulled her hard against him and possessed her mouth, her assumptions altered. Bring down the shutters, she told herself. You can’t risk him asking questions and seeing too much. She pulled away, asking, ‘What do you fly?’

  ‘I’m not meant to say . . . but I suppose it can’t hurt. Fairey Battles, light bombers. I’m the observer-navigator and we fly night missions – but listen, Cora—’

  ‘Coralie. You’ve become rather a good kisser, Navigator Flynn. Had a bit of practice?’ She felt the knot of his tie move with his throat, and recognised his old diffidence. Good. Let him get tongue-tied. One day she’d be strong enough to hear the ending to Florence’s story. And one day she might sit down with Donal and tell him all about Coralie de Lirac. But not now. She’d invested too much in her life here to risk being unmasked as a fraud. She stepped back.

  ‘Cora, don’t go!’

  ‘Coralie.’ It wrenched her heart to deny the hope and desire in the hands that reached for her. God knew, she might never see him again. That silver wing above his left pocket was the real thing, not like her cheap glitter. Donal risked his life every time he took to the air, while she danced and sang. ‘I’m going, Donal, and I don’t want you to follow.’

  Was he even listening? ‘I’m in Paris till tomorrow night. We could—’

  ‘No. I’m sorry I kissed you – but doesn’t that tell you I’m as bad as I ever was? I’m not only married, I’m a mother.’ She cinched her waist with her hands and took another step back. ‘I’ve filled out, see? A little bit matronly, these days.’

  ‘You’ve got a shape like a film star. Please don’t go.’

  She walked away, refusing to turn even when it dawned on her that she’d left her comfortable shoes in the club, along with her coat, and that she had a long trek home. And she was still wearing a gold hat. If she avoided being robbed, the first gendarme she met would book her for soliciting.

  ‘Coralie!’ Donal’s anguish reached her, but he wasn’t chasing her.

  ‘Be safe up there in the skies, my friend,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let the buggers bring you down.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Christmas 1939 froze the pipes and put such thick rime on the windows that Coralie prepared a festive dinner in the kitchen with gloves on. She’d invited Una, Ramon – who had ditched his latest woman, or been ditched – Arkady and Florian to her table.

  As she trussed the skinny goose she’d bought at the market at ten times last year’s price, she was interrupted by a knock. She was astonished to find Julie at the door, clutching a basket of apples and trying to hide a party dress by holding her winter coat closed at the neck.

  ‘Julie? You were meant to take today off.’

  The girl answered with a nervous giggle. Heavens, had Coralie really expected her to stay at home? Never mind, she was here now. Her parents, uncles and aunts were all dozing with their mouths open, except one aunt who kept making comments on Julie’s new hairstyle.

  Coralie took in the mass of curls and interwoven ribbon. ‘It is rather . . . Hollywood.’

  ‘I know!’ Julie went straight to the hall mirror. ‘The girl at the hairdresser’s said I look just like Bette Davis in Jezebel.’ She took off her coat and turned to Coralie, revealing a cardigan straining over an uplifted bosom. ‘I’ll help you cook and I’ll serve at table.’

  ‘I’ll find you a nice big overall to wear.’ Coralie couldn’t resist adding, ‘It’s just us girls. The men can’t come.’ Seeing Julie’s face drop in dismay, she laughed. ‘Joking. Shall I put you next to Florian?’

  Everyone brought something: coal, wine, a nip of cognac, potatoes, smoked sausage. Una contributed a case of champagne, a gift from a wealthy admirer who worked for the government. Yet more unexpectedly, she brought Ottilia von Silberstrom.

  Una had met the Baronne in London in 1937, but hadn’t given her much thought until Coralie’s brief glimpse of her on boulevard de la Madeleine. Una had afterwards made enquiries, but everybody said the same thing: ‘Poor darling Tilly? Didn’t she take refuge in London? Why would she return to Paris, the way things are?’ Una had been inclined to think that Coralie’s eyes had deceived her.

  Then, a few days ago, Una had found herself standing behind Ottilia in the queue at a tobacconist’s off quai d’Orsay. ‘Turns out, she’s been living like a hermit in rue de Vaugirard since the summer,’ she told Coralie, in a low voice. They both looked at Ottilia, who was bending down to make the acquaintance of Noëlle. She was draped in thistledown fur. Noëlle was stroking a sleeve, clearly bewitched.

  Ottilia looked towards them and smiled, and Coralie returned a nod. The silent exchange was as good as a conversation: We’ve met before. A man we both love stands between us and we will not speak of it.

  Una, seeing none of this, went on in an undertone, ‘I hated to think of her all alone through Christmas so I dispensed with European etiquette and invited her. Don’t say you’re offended! You asked me to find her. ’

  ‘To discuss business. Oh, Lord, look at that.’

  Ramon was now kissing Ottilia’s hand and, like Noëlle, seemed to be slithering under a spell. Had Ottilia had this effect on Dietrich too?

  Suddenly aware of her grease-spotted apron and red cheeks, Coralie escaped to the kitchen, dispelling her emotions by lifting pan lids and slamming them down again.

  Una trailed after her, opening the oven door. ‘Oh, joy! Roast goose, my favourite. Forget work for a day, and get to know Tilly better. When the moment feels natural, we can mention La Passerinette. Let me tell you something, the girl under all that fur and those pearls is a sweetheart.’

  And indeed, over champagne aperitifs and an hors d’oeuvre of braised chicory, Ottilia displayed none of the grandeur that had so offended Coralie on Epsom Downs.

  Later, as Ramon carved the goose, Coralie recalled Dietrich explaining that Ottilia floated through life, the implication being that she didn’t quite ‘get’ the world. The impression solidified when Ottilia said that she’d returned to P
aris to oversee the freighting of her art collection back to England.

  ‘My husband insists we bring the paintings to London.’ Franz had been angry with her for leaving them in rue de Vaugirard, she said. ‘I thought they were safe, but he does not trust the French or anybody. And certainly not me.’ Ottilia laughed shakily. ‘He said I must go to Paris to arrange for the boxes to be shipped, only . . . So many!’ She’d sat in her flat all the summer, unable to lift a telephone to seek advice. ‘Graf von Elbing used to do that sort of thing for me.’ She met Coralie’s eye briefly. Not in challenge, in a bid for understanding. ‘I called his home in Germany, but his wife told me he wasn’t living there.’

  Coralie was cutting up meat for Noëlle, checking for bones. ‘So where is he living?’

  ‘Berlin. She gave me a number but told it me wrongly. Deliberately so, I’m sure, because it was like no Berlin number I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Has he no friends who could get hold of him for you?’ Una asked.

  ‘I tried some galleries, and an auction house he deals with, but as soon as I said my name, they cut the call. In Berlin “von Silberstrom” is as well known as Rothschild in London, or Rockefeller in New York. Only, these days, our name makes people put down the phone. I rang my brother Max in Geneva, and he thought Dietrich might be in Shanghai.’

  ‘China?’ Julie gasped. The word circled the table, gathering incredulity.

  ‘I loved Shanghai Express,’ Coralie said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to be on that train. China’s at war, isn’t it?’

  ‘With Japan,’ Una said.

  Ottilia sighed. ‘Dietrich went to buy Oriental art, which is going cheaply now.’

  ‘One man’s war is another man’s profit.’ Una said it with a half-smile but Ramon growled, ‘Damn capitalist.’

  Not a capitalist, just passerine, Coralie answered silently. Flitting from tree to tree, feeding as he goes. ‘None of this explains how you got stuck in Paris,’ she said to Ottilia. It was dawning on her that this stranded creature might some day become a liability.

  The answer was simple. Once war had been declared and the night-ferry to England suspended, Ottilia couldn’t conceive of any other means of returning to London.

  ‘What about travelling through Spain and Portugal?’ Una chided.

  ‘Or Marseille?’ Coralie put in. ‘You could have sailed to Gibraltar. Or crossed from Brittany to Portsmouth.’

  Ottilia stared. ‘Where are they, though? Any of those places?’

  Such helplessness clearly appealed to the males around the table, particularly Ramon. The scourge of the bourgeoisie stared moonstruck, missing his lips with his glass, quietly mouthing, ‘Such white skin, such auburn hair.’ Meanwhile, Coralie thought that six months’ hard labour under Granny Flynn would have done Ottilia von Silberstrom the world of good.

  For her part, Ottilia was besotted with Noëlle, wanting nothing but to hold her. And, of course, today wasn’t just Christmas Day, it was Noëlle’s second birthday and after lunch came presents. Coralie had made a rag-doll. Una had bought Noëlle her first pair of proper shoes, cream kid with round toes and ribbon ties. Ramon produced a wooden dog on a string and made them scream with laughter by barking as the child pulled it across the floor. Ottilia presented a beautifully wrapped box containing a platinum and diamond bracelet.

  ‘We can’t accept that,’ Coralie said awkwardly, and Ottilia’s eyes brimmed.

  ‘But you must. I love to give and so much has been stolen from me. Really, take it because it will spare me pain.’

  When, later, Coralie tentatively broached the subject of buying La Passerinette, Ottilia breathed, ‘Of course you must have it. Yes, take it.’

  Now Coralie understood Dietrich’s frustration. Ottilia had been born to boundless wealth, but she’d lost most of her assets when she fled Germany. What she had left needed to be protected. From swindlers and, it would appear, from Ottilia herself.

  After dinner, the men elected to walk down towards the river to stretch their legs and smoke, and once they’d muffled themselves against the weather and left, Una found paper and pencils.

  ‘Let’s wrap up business while the men are away. Coralie, you want that shop. Tilly, you’d like to sell. You need ready cash, I guess?’

  Ottilia nodded. ‘I do not properly understand, but when I go to the Chase Bank, they say my money is frozen.’

  ‘Well, it’s jolly chilly out.’

  ‘I only have the money in the suitcase I brought from London.’

  Una found Radio Paris on the wireless and, to the velvet strains of Maurice Chevalier, helped Coralie and Ottilia carve out a deal. Coralie would take over the shop lease and buy the business for fifty thousand francs, to be paid in monthly instalments. That would include all the stock and whatever goodwill had survived Lorienne’s fingernails. Coralie would also employ Violaine Beaumont, who was shortly to be released from medical supervision and would return to the flat above the empty shop.

  Ottilia explained, ‘La Passerinette is her home and she is frightened of leaving it. My dear Dietrich – I mean, Graf von Elbing – says that she is a little brown bird who builds a nest and sits on the eggs, invisible to all. What bird is that?’

  ‘A chicken?’ Coralie hazarded.

  ‘Wren, surely,’ Una offered.

  ‘Dietrich speaks in pictures. Did you not notice that when you met him?’ Ottilia’s eyes sought Coralie’s.

  ‘Not really,’ Coralie hedged. Did Ottilia know of her affair with Dietrich? The childlike gaze offered no clues. Coralie had given Una a hazy outline of her early days in Paris, mentioning a German who’d ‘looked after’ her but without mentioning a name. Una, fortunately, was fiddling with the radio dial, trying to get a sharper signal, so the awkward conversation died. ‘Let’s talk about fashion,’ Coralie suggested. ‘I need lots of ideas if I’m to pay you on the nail every month.’

  Ottilia took the bait, and they drew hats until the men came home.

  *

  Just under five months later, in May 1940, German forces attacked the Netherlands. On the tenth of the month their air force bombed the heart out of Rotterdam. On the fourteenth, the Dutch surrendered. The German Army swept on into Belgium.

  In Paris, people assured each other, ‘The Low Countries don’t have our defences or our fine army. Or our Maginot Line. The Germans won’t get this far.’

  The Germans reached the Ardennes forest, the ancient and supposedly impenetrable boundary between Belgium and France, smashed through it and turned along the Somme, to cut off the Allied troops in Belgium.

  The British Expeditionary Force, which had thought to stop the enemy’s westward advance, was driven back towards the sea. On 27 May, a massacre was averted by the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of troops from the beaches of the Flanders coast. ‘The miracle of Dunkirk’ left France with a demoralised army facing Blitzkrieg, lightning war: formations of German tanks and armoured vehicles, supported by bombers and fighter planes, moving at breathtaking speed. The Maginot Line, stood un-breached but useless. The enemy had cut around it, outflanked it.

  On 3 June, an air raid on Paris was announced by wailing sirens that shocked people from sleep. Guns pounded, impossible to know how far away or quite from which direction. The press kept up an optimistic tone. We will conquer because we are the strongest. Even so, people spoke of leaving Paris, of crossing the Loire, which would surely provide a second barrier to an advancing army.

  On 13 June, those who remained in the capital felt the ground shake from artillery fire. They saw shells streaking across a sky dark with smoke, and heard a sound like mill wheels grinding. An army approaching. Refugees spilling in from the north spoke of German fighter planes strafing them on the roads, and thousands dying as they tried to outrun the enemy to reach France and its supposedly safe countryside. In the parks and boulevards, people looked into the sky, and thought
of Warsaw and Rotterdam. They noticed birds collecting in the trees, flying up, like fountain jets, then migrating in dark flocks.

  Humans took warning and began to leave too, in cars, trucks, on bicycles and horseback, grid-locking every road out. Julie and her family went, taking Florian with them. Ramon Cazaubon, though technically outside the age range for military conscription, left to offer himself anyway. Coralie and the friends who stayed with her barricaded themselves into the flat on rue de Seine.

  On 14 June, the Germans entered Paris. In tanks, in armoured vehicles, in huge numbers.

  Reichsminister Göring was one of the commanders at the forefront of the occupation. He brought with him a special adviser, a man who knew Paris well. A man who cut a fine figure in a Luftwaffe uniform and who cherished long-held vengeance in his heart.

  Part Three

  Chapter Fifteen

  Coralie stepped out on to the pavement, blinking in the light, Noëlle’s small hand in hers. Four days shut indoors, waiting for invasion, bombardment and death, had been as much as she could bear. If they were going to die, let them die breathing fresh air.

  Paris had fallen. The news had been barked around the streets, in harshly accented French, from loudspeakers mounted on trucks. Electricity had been cut, telephones, too, but at least the shellfire had stopped.

  Everything looked strangely peaceful. Too peaceful. On a Saturday in the middle of June, rue de Seine should have been a hive of commerce, yet every shop and café had its shutters down. Most of the population had gone. Those who had stayed, like Coralie and her friends, were still cowering indoors.

  Had things been normal, she would have been at La Passerinette. Making, selling, celebrating nearly six months of ownership. But La Passerinette and place de la Madeleine lay on the other side of the river in what, for all she knew, was a war zone.

  ‘Maman! Look!’ Noëlle toddled a few steps, pointing eagerly. It took a moment for Coralie to see what was exciting the child.